Kuku's ₹3,500 Crore IPO and the Birdcall Behind the Name

A startup that began life imitating a birdsong is now asking the public markets to value it at the price of a mid-sized listed company. This week Kuku, the parent of audio app Kuku FM and the video platform Kuku TV, filed confidential draft papers with SEBI for an IPO of roughly ₹3,500 crore, aiming for a valuation of up to ₹15,000 crore. It is one of the more telling listings in a crowded 2026 IPO pipeline, partly because of the numbers and partly because of the name itself.

Most brand stories get told backwards, once a company is big enough that people care. Kuku's is worth telling forwards, because the name change tracks almost exactly with the bet that turned a regional audiobook app into one of the fastest-growing content businesses in the country.

A name borrowed from the koel

Ask anyone who grew up in an Indian summer what 'kuhu-kuhu' means and they will point at a tree. It is the call of the koel, the cuckoo whose song carries across north Indian afternoons from March onwards. The bird is so tied to sound in the popular imagination that 'koyal' is a stock metaphor for a sweet singing voice in Hindi film lyrics.

Naming an audio app after it was not subtle, and it did not need to be. When the company launched in 2018, the entire pitch was sound: long-form stories, audiobooks and self-help, narrated in Indian languages for listeners who would rather hear a tale than read one. A brand built on a birdcall told you, before you opened the app, what it was for. That is the rare kind of name that does marketing work for free.

From Mebigo Labs to Kuku Technologies

The consumer brand and the legal entity were never the same thing. The company was incorporated as Mebigo Labs Private Limited, the sort of invented, faintly techy holding name that founders pick before they know what they are building. Mebigo was the company; Kuku FM was the product people loved.

Ahead of the listing, that gap has been closed. The parent is now Kuku Technologies Limited, folding the recognisable consumer name up into the corporate one. It is a small, dry filing detail, but it signals intent. You do not rename the holding company after the app unless you expect the app's name to be the thing investors and the public remember.

Why 'FM' had to go

The more interesting edit is the quiet disappearance of two letters. For years the brand was Kuku FM — the 'FM' a nod to radio, to the idea of an always-on audio companion. It anchored the company firmly in sound.

That anchor became a limit. Over the past two years the real growth has come from vertical video microdramas: minute-or-two episodes, shot for a phone held upright, strung into series of fifty-plus chapters that hook viewers into paying to keep watching. The company runs this through Kuku TV, a separate app, and pushes out a heavy slate of original short shows every month, increasingly using AI in the production pipeline to keep costs down.

A platform doing that is not an FM station any more. Shortening the public identity to plain Kuku lets one short, soft, memorable word cover both the audio business and the video one. The koel still sings; it just does video now too.

The numbers behind the listing

Names are charming, but markets price growth. Kuku's case rests on a steep revenue curve:

• Revenue crossed roughly ₹1,400 crore in FY26, against close to ₹240 crore a year earlier — a jump of several times over in a single year.
• The IPO is structured to raise in the region of ₹2,500–3,500 crore.
• The target valuation of about ₹15,000 crore works out to roughly $1.8 billion.
• The microdrama slate runs to well over a hundred new shows a month, the engine doing most of the heavy lifting on those revenue gains.

The shape of that growth — modest base, sudden surge — is the classic microdrama signature. Indian audiences took to the format faster than almost anyone forecast, and Kuku was early and aggressive in chasing Tier-2 and Tier-3 viewers who pay in small amounts to unlock the next episode. The confidential filing route, increasingly common, lets the company test the waters with regulators before its financials are splashed across the front pages.

The founder from a Sikar village

The company was started by three IIT alumni — Lal Chand Bisu, Vikas Goyal and Vinod Kumar Meena. Bisu, the chief executive, grew up in a farming family in a small village in Rajasthan's Sikar district before studying at IIT Jodhpur. That background is not just colour. A founder who has lived in small-town India tends to understand, instinctively, an audience that reads less, listens and watches more, and treasures stories in its own language. Kuku's content strategy has leaned on exactly that instinct.

The firm has also pulled in serious outside money on its way here, including a large funding round in late 2025 backed by global gaming and content investors who saw the microdrama wave coming. That capital paid for the video pivot the IPO is now meant to scale.

What the IPO is really testing

The filing puts a real question to the market, and it is not only about Kuku. Microdramas are a young, fast-moving and slightly chaotic business, dependent on viewers paying coin-by-coin to binge melodrama on their phones. The format works beautifully when a show catches on and evaporates when it does not. Rivals — homegrown and Chinese-origin alike — are spending hard for the same eyeballs.

A successful listing would do two things. It would hand Kuku a war chest to keep churning out shows and buying audience attention, and it would mark the first time public investors get to price the microdrama boom directly rather than admire it from outside. Plenty of investors are still unsure whether this is a durable habit or a passing one.

There is a neat symmetry to where the company has landed. It set out to reinvent radio for a generation that had drifted from it, took its name from the most recognisable birdsong in the country, and is now heading for the stock exchange as a video company. The koel, as it happens, is famous for laying its eggs in other birds' nests and letting the format do the rest. Kuku has built its own. The market will soon decide what it is worth.